1. Field
The subject matter described herein relates generally to the transfer of information in a computer system and, more particularly, to a driver and method therefore that provides real-time access to a host-side Universal Serial Bus (USB) command and data traffic.
2. Background
In USB isochronous data transfer, a device-specific driver sends data transfer requests to the USB bus driver. A set amount of data at 1 millisecond (1 USB frame) intervals, referred to as a USB isochronous data stream, is transferred between a host and a client device. For example, the host can be a personal computer and the client device can be an audio player and speakers.
The perceived quality of USB audio depends on the regularity of this service. A gap in the data stream itself, or an irregularity in the actual data, may cause an artifact in the audio as rendered by a speaker. This artifact is commonly referred to as a glitch.
Fault detection may be done either with dedicated hardware, by listening to the rendered audio stream, or by recording the audio stream and then using post-processing to detect faults.
The dedicated hardware method uses a USB device programmed to represent itself as some other type of USB device, such as, a pair of USB speakers. The device then monitors the incoming data stream in order to identify the faults. In this approach, emulation of a device is used in place of the real device.
Listening to the rendered audio stream requires an operator to listen to the real-time audio.
Recording and post-processing the audio stream is not done in real time. This makes identification of the fault difficult. The recording step reduces the reliability of the data.